David Bergen Hybrid Book Launch

Join us as we celebrate the launch of David Bergen’s new novel Away from the Dead (Goose Lane Editions). This event features a reading and a conversation hosted by Maurice Mierau. Presented in partnership with McNally Robinson Booksellers as part of THIN AIR 2023: The Winnipeg International Writers Festival.

The launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events at the store. The venue is accessible.

In Away from the Dead, David Bergen takes us to a place where chaos reigns, where answers come from everywhere and nowhere, and where both the beauty and horror of humanity are on full display. As anarchists, Bolsheviks, and the White Army all come and go, each claiming freedom and justice, Bergen embeds his readers into the lives of characters connected through love, family, and loyalty. A bookseller south of Kiev deserts the army and writes poetry to his love back home; an adopted Mennonite-Ukrainian stableboy runs with the anarchists only to discover that love and the planting of crops is preferable to killing; a beautiful young peasant tries to stop a Mennonite landowner from stealing her child. In a world of violence, these three learn to love and hate and love again, hoping, against all odds, that one can turn away from the dead.

Praised by the Montreal Gazette as “one of Canada’s best writers” and by the Globe and Mail as “inventive and electrifying,” David Bergen is the bestselling author of numerous acclaimed novels and short-story collections, including The Time In Between, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Out of Mind, winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Away from the Dead is his thirteenth book of fiction. He lives in Winnipeg.

Maurice Mierau’s last book was a monograph on the poetry of Patrick Friesen, How Mind and Body Move. His memoir, Detachment, won the Kobzar Literary Award, as well as the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. His poetry collections are Autobiographical Fictions, Fear Not–winner of the ReLit Award for Poetry–and Ending with Music. Mierau was founding editor of the Canadian fiction imprint Enfield & Wizenty, and of the online magazine Winnipeg Review.